Thursday, June 01, 2017

Oh Dear. The Trumps Keep Multiplying.

Let’s see now. Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is under investigation for weird cloak-and-daggerish meetings with the Russians. Ivanka just took a bunch of money from the Saudis for her favorite charity. Eric and Don Jr. are traveling the world to promote Trump hotels and golf courses while being looked after by the Secret Service on our dime.

Tiffany is going to law school. If only the others were in law school.

Pop
question: Who’s your favorite mini-Trump? I’m sort of attached to Eric,
the one who compared waterboarding to a fraternity hazing.

In
theory, Eric and Don Jr. are supposed to be totally unconnected to the
government, running the family business in a manner so separate from the
president that they might easily be working in a totally different
dimension.

Hahaha.

“I
do not talk about the government with him and he does not talk about
the business with us. That’s kind of a steadfast pact we made, and it’s
something we honor,” Eric told Forbes earlier this year.

Then, Forbes reported,
about “two minutes later” Eric volunteered that he’d still be making
“profitability reports and stuff like that” to the president. He and Dad
are, Eric added, “pretty inseparable.”

Darned
tootin’. Besides traveling the world to publicize Trump golf courses
and hang out with potential investors, Eric and Donald Jr. are also
working the political side of the street. The boys recently met with Republican leaders to discuss 2018 election plans. (Don Jr., by the way, is the one who was recently off shooting prairie dogs during their breeding season.)

Photo

Eric and Lara Trump leaving Air Force One, with beagles in tow, in April.Credit
Al Drago/The New York Times

Eric’s
wife, Lara, was at the meeting, too. More relatives! When she’s not
talking with Republican leaders, Lara is active in an animal rights
group called the Beagle Freedom Project. It helps find homes for dogs
that were used in scientific studies, which is commendable. On the other
hand, one of its leaders spent six years in jail for harassing research workers.

Her
father-in-law isn’t really into pets, which is now looking like a good
thing. Given the way he operates, if Trump had, say, a cocker spaniel it
would probably now be deputy secretary of agriculture.

Lately,
the Trump relatives we’ve been hearing most about are Ivanka, an
official presidential adviser, and her husband, Jared, whose portfolio
includes modernizing government and bringing peace to the Middle East.
They recently accompanied the president on his overseas trip — the one
that began in Saudi Arabia with fun festivities and the glowing orb.

While
the Trumps were there, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates
announced they were honoring Ivanka by donating $100 million to a World
Bank fund for women entrepreneurs.

Perhaps
you remember a presidential debate last fall in which Trump denounced
the Clinton Foundation for accepting money from conservative Arab
nations like, um, Saudi Arabia. (“You talk about women and women’s
rights? So these are people who push gays off buildings. These are
people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their
money.”) Ah, well.

Jared’s
current issue is the mysterious back channel he attempted to set up
with the Russians. Like so very many things involving this
administration, it’s a controversy in which the most positive
interpretation is that he had no idea what the hell he was doing.

In
December Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russia bank, to
talk about setting up a special communication system, apparently so he
could talk without American intelligence overhearing.

It had to be disastrous in some way, since Mike Flynn was involved. Among the possible explanations:

A)
The incoming administration had directed a 36-year-old real estate
developer with no government experience to solve the Syrian crisis while
keeping the whole thing secret from everybody except Vladimir Putin.

B) Jared was trying to do a favor for his sister-in-law Lara by setting up a channel to smuggle abused beagles out of Russia.

C) This is something about Russian money backing Trump businesses.

I am of course going for the beagles. But feel free to be cynical.

“We
know Kushner’s business operations are in constant need of loans and
investors. It’s highly suspicious,” said Fred Wertheimer of the
good-government group Democracy 21. He used to specialize in campaign
finance reform, but now Wertheimer lives in a world where a president’s
daughter joins Dad at a dinner with the Chinese president the very same
day she receives trademark rights for selling Ivanka Trump glitz in
China.

And
speaking of sleazy contacts with foreign investors, last week Senate
Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley called for an investigation
into “potentially fraudulent statements and misrepresentations” made by a
Chinese company promoting deals that seemed to involve U.S. visas for
financiers who made big investments in a luxury condo project in New
Jersey.

The condos are being developed by Kushner Companies and were being marketed by Jared’s sister. Yes! There’s no end to them.